Tag Archives: Virginia

First up today is the piece about the state of Virginia having a major data center outage. Here’s yet another catastrophe that’s the result of poorly planned and executed maintenance work (technicians were “checking for faulty storage equipment”? Do you not know it’s faulty or not BEFORE you start screwing around with it?). If there was even a chance that this could happen, it should have been done in a maintenance window well outside of business hours. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be surprising, considering this is the bunch that had rampant failures in their network because they didn’t bother to specify any redundancy in the contract.

The head of the Viriginia Information Technology Agency is quoted as saying sometimes failures happen no matter what you do. Not the kind of thing you want to hear from your IT people after doing something glaringly dumb.

The shipment of multicolored wigs and red squeaky noses is on its way to the Virginia Information Technology Agency, data center bozos of the week!

The tax break incentives in the data center war are getting absolutely crazy. Virginia throws in 10 years of no sales tax on IT equipment, North Carolina ups the ante with $10.3 million for Apple. Given the small number of people actually employed in these facilities, do they really gain more than they give out in corporate welfare?

First item up is the story that Virginia has had massive service failures in state departments because their $2.3B outsourcing deal with Northrop Grumman neglected to require network redundancy. What is it with providers these days just happily letting customers walk off the cliff? 12 outages and 100 hours of downtime in 5 WEEKS! It’s like IBM and Texas where IBM knew a piece of equipment was problematic and allowed it to fail without backup because backup wasn’t specified. Go the extra mile and be the hero, people!